One of several river walk concepts proposed for Dallas in recent years, this one on the site of Dallas Love Field

When Dallas City Council member Dwaine Caraway mentioned something about a river running through downtown Dallas during yesterday’s Quality of Life Committee meeting, it barely registered on this end. After all, it’s not the first time he’s talked about flooding Main Street. Other council members have mentioned it too, usually in passing and often in jest. But it’s fun to have fun with the former mayor, and so, here and there, folks took note of his modest proposal, the subject of a segment on The Ticket this morning.

“We’re Dallas,” Caraway told Craig Miller, George Dunham and Gordon Keith, whose Fake Dwaine Caraway is never as good as The Real Thing. “We gotta do what takes care of Dallas. I’m on the Dallas team, and we have an obligation to do everything we possibly can to make sure our city’s vibrant, exciting and people wanna come. It’s a city on the move, and you gotta have a vision of it. We can’t build any more bridges. We got our park over Woodall Rodgers. We’re rediversifying with our hotel. What else can we do? We lost the Cowboys. What else can we do? You have to have the vision, and it can’t just be about today. It has to be about tomorrow.

“We compete against San Antonio, for example, and they have a river walk. We have Main Street. You can’t drive down Main Street. Maybe 100 cars can get down Main Street on a daily basis. It’s been talked about how we can have a canal and sidewalk cafes. We got the deadest downtown in the United States of America.”

He doesn’t know how much the river walk would cost. But Caraway says it doesn’t matter. Far as he’s concerned, it ought to be easy: “Three feet deep, pull out the sidewalks, put up the awnings — damn.” Trench it, and the people will come.

Except …

Downtown Dallas Inc. has actually studied the feasibility of putting Main Street underwater. No, really. Somewhere there’s a document containing the myriad reasons it can’t be done, chief among them: It would endanger Main Street’s historic buildings, wreak havoc on the infrastructure and utilities, impact existing and future economic development (hello, Tim Headington) and, right, interfere with future plans to develop something along that other river known as The Trinity.

“That’s why we don’t think it’s practical,” says Downtown Dallas Inc.’s president and CEO John Crawford. “I have no idea what it would cost to do something like that, but it would be enormous to create something like that. But forget about the cost. The reality is it’s not set up to do something like that. We’re not beyond trying to be visionary, and we applaud Dwaine for trying to be visionary, to make something special downtown. That’s just not the route we’re going to be able to take.”

But to be clear: Caraway’s not the first council member to propose this.

The San Antonio River Walk, of which Mark Cuban's a big, big fan

Former council member and mayoral candidate Ron Natinsky is the reason DDI looked into the viability of the concept in the first place. He used to pitch Crawford on the concept quite frequently following one of his myriad world travels.

“And as a result, we always revisited that and looked at it to see if anything changed to make it more practical, and nothing had,” Crawford says. “Fortunately for downtown we have so many more things going on that have created a new face for downtown we think we’re on the right track. The Downtown Dallas 360 plan spells it out. It deals with the next 10 years, and were happy with where we are in terms of the progress that’s being made. It’s not fast enough and it’s never enough, but were happy with it.”

In recent years some speculative Dallas developers have had quite the obsession with mimicking San Antonio’s tourist attraction, which Mark Cuban once called an “ugly, muddy-watered thing,” if only to dig in his Spurs. Just four years ago real estate developer Randall Turner called every media outlet in town to pitch his proposal for a Texas Riviera … where Dallas Love Field stands, um. The plan still lives online, where, you’ll note, there’s a “2.5 Mile River Walk with Lakes, Bridges & Islands” accompanied by photos of San Antonio and renderings of Dallas’ future.

As Crawford explains, yes, Dallas and San Antonio complete for a few things, but a river walk ain’t one of ‘em.

“The river walk happens to be their feature for their downtown,” he says. “It’s a neat feature, but they don’t have near the other assets we have, for example. And, besides, comparing one city to another is unnecessary. It’s worthy of discussion. If one of our council members brings it up, we need to look at it.”

Which they have. And it won’t work. Any other suggestions?

“We need to be focused on moving the New York Stock Exchange to Dallas,” says Crawford. “How about that?”

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